Your hold is ready! (4. 30. 25)

Author

Cavar S
April 30, 2025

Happy (official) spring, everyone! It’s warming up quickly here in Davis as I sprint toward the end of my PhD and my time here (with more news on what’s next simmering –– keep an eye out!).

This has been a month of joy mixed with immense, often existential anxiety: joy at my latest 10k, which I ran along the beach in San Francisco on a lovely weekend away, joy at caring for my friends, spending time outside, and receiving positive feedback on my now-99.9% ready dissertation. Joy at the notification that my story, Mad Studies, has been selected to receive Tenebrous Press’s Brave New Weird award (link to previously-announced shortlist), official announcements for which are coming in early May.

Annnnnd…..anxiety, doom, and existential terror, of course, about being trans and autistic and also a person with basic morals and ethics in this world.

I’m finding refuge in unexpected places –– talking with my dentist just the other day about my dissertation and finding out about his own digital community involvement; hearing feedback on the “timeliness” of Failure to Comply while responding that I was writing it in conversation with things that have happened for centuries, things that happened to me before any of our current political moment was imaginable to most people. I’m tired of saying, “we’re living under fascism,” and I’m tired of saying, “I have always been a cynic, but never thought it would be quite like this,” but I am saying these things because they are true. The things I write and read have and continue to be mediators between the cynicism that feels true to who I am and the new cynicisms I have had to develop in order to survive.

I’ll look back at the things I published years ago and think, oh, they knew. They, past!me, we were trying to tell us something.

No, we weren’t trying to tell us anything, nothing we didn’t already know, because more has stayed the same than has changed.

From birth, Lee had borne the stigmata of conspicuous absence, inherited from Patrick and Nadine like some archaic curse. Nearly two decades prior, in a then-progressive move to protect cross-sexers (CS) from the threat of domestic terrorism, the president (a member of the Centrist Party, whose policies “satisfied the sane and angered extremists on both sides”) had proposed a compromise between the American right-wing and the CS community. The former would, naturally, be permitted their First Amendment right to assemble and speak freely as they wished. They could conduct physical assaults (Second Amendment) if the offending weapons were deployed from their Free-Expression Zones, which lined the base of the hills upon which segregated CS towns, known as Exclusion Zones, were built. As for the CS, Patrick and Nadine included, legal sex-change guaranteed admission to a Zone, so long as they did not stray beyond its gates. Within these walls, they found each other.

This idea honestly seems optimistic at this point.

There is almost a sense of relief in me as I re-read these pieces, written when the fascism we see directly now was still covered by a fig leaf. There is a sense of relief I feel as the immediacy of global crises, particularly the ongoing, escalating genocide in Palestine “comes home” to the imperial core, not because I believe that my suffering somehow alleviates Palestinians’, but because this shared sense of devastation at the hands of empire offers a hitherto ignored potentiality for shared struggle. Last year, at this time, we were on the lawns of our campuses. This time, those of us most marginalized in this struggle have been and continue to be disappeared by agents of the state, whose toleration for free expression extends exclusively not even to all of those who have white skin, but exclusively to those who those who act as mouthpieces for whiteness.

Palestine –– and, more broadly, international and cross-group solidarity practices –– is still freeing us. I don’t see immediate hope on the horizon, but I see stories of generational survival, resistance, and even pleasure in the face of the unimaginable, and think, okay. On the other side of this, someday, there will still be a we.

Speaking of community, edits are moving forward at pace with Mad Dykes, Queer Worlds, the issue of Sinister Wisdom I am guest-editing. I just received proofs and am working with authors on final revisions. This issue slaps. That’s not even tooting my own horn –– it’s all the authors. I can’t wait for early 2026 (seems so far away!!) to share it with you.

Also, manywor(l)ds closes at the end of the day today, and our next issue is out May 15. Get your submission in if you haven’t already, but don’t worry. If you miss it, we reopen June 1.

In self-promotion news: my sixth (!) chapbook, a neuroqueer scholarpoetic thing called how we sheep, co-written with scholarly-(anti-)crush/comrade/collaborator ulysses/constance bougie, is out now Ethel Press. For background on what we’re doing with queerness, Madness, and (a)sexualities, check out our work in) Kairos and Asexualities. You can order it on its own or purchase it bundled with my third chapbook and first with Ethel, Out of Mind & Into Body.

And, as usual, check out Failure to Comply digitally and in print and on Bookshop in both formats, on Goodreads and Storygraph, and request it at your local bookstores and libraries. Find inspo/similar reads/books that fed Failure to Comply at my Bookshop affiliate page, where each of your orders gives me a dollar.

Now, onto the recommendations!

Today’s Recs:

Books:

Audio/Visual Media:

Poetry & Prose & In-Between:

Essays and Articles:

My Recent Work: